A long time ago, I migrated from VB2008's 2D gamedev to 3D gamedev using C++. Many friends recommended Ogre for me (cause it has great features, extensible, easy to use (?!) etc.). So I downloaded Ogre, set up everything as said in the tutorial and began to write code from the tutorial. First, VC++ couldn't find header files. After setting all paths, Ogre started to show stupid error messages. I've checked up in the tutorial, nope about it. I asked in the forums, I got NO answers. Then, after two days of combining, moving etc. I succeeded in booting Ogre up. I completed first tutorial, but I was totally confused. Entities aren't things such as Billboard, Cameras... (Billboard? Camera? What the heck?). I Googled so much to understand these concepts. But again I couldn't understand any of the tutorials from 4 and after. I couldn't find a good exporter for Ogre's mesh format. Then I decided to search for some other engines. The first result came up on Google was - Irrlicht! I saw not-so-impressing screenshots and I thought it's not gonna be a hit. But when I downloaded it and opened demos, I was very surprised. Started up with first tutorial and then I saw how it's powerful and simple. I set it up for only 15 minutes and wrote my code. API is really well documented and I gave up on Ogre and gone for Irrlicht. With some extensions, Irrlicht can be very competitive with Ogre. And yes, Irrlicht was really faster than Ogre and the code seemed to be clean and easy to understand, on contrast with some Ogre code I saw from my friend which was HORRIBLY looking (but my friend maybe wasn't a good coder at all
).
Still, I think that Irrlicht is brilliant 3D engine. It also gives a fairly good collision detection, and it can be easily integrated with irrKlang, which is yet very good sound engine which suits my needs.
Maybe Ogre has better features than Irrlicht, but I don't care, because the difference couldn't leave in shame how Irrlicht is fast & lightweight.
If you think that Irrlicht cannot be used for commercial games, you're wrong. I know (not personally) a man who created a game with Irrlicht and it was really great-looking for me. I have NVIDIA 5200FX and the game from Andross named Hell Throne: Lepteria (maybe you know it) is running with 1FPS and it's made with NeoAxis which's based on Ogre.
My decision is Irrlicht, no mattered how набуџен Ogre is (it's Serbian
).